Carl makes a number of gritty observations in the thread that deserve a separate post. They really do make indispensable contributions to advancing the study of this thought-provoking film on the web:
Other symbolic elements, presumably coming from the novel that ought to be explored:
1) the snakes are not simply from a pit, but from the breast of the corpse of a cowboy/gunman found in the pit.
2) Most of the main gunman characters (LaBeef, Rooster, Chaney) are shot in a non-mortal way in the side.
3) Repeated motif of animalistic and moronic men occurs: the bear-dressed mountain man, the animal-sound making outlaw, the mule-tormenting Indian children (inbreds?) at Bagby’s store.
4) Trading, trading, trading. Everybody’s always trading. Corpses and live men become objects of it. Lawler’s and Cheek’s discussions put a lot of emphasis on the role of honor in the film, but more needs to be said about the role of commerce.
5) Mattie’s pony–the death of this animal hits her harder than any other death. Brings home her share of responsibility for all the killin’ (yes, of outlaws, but these are men nonetheless) that’s occurred in her quest for justice.
Point no. 5, especially, should undermine the various claims for the little girl’s fundamentally Christian motivation. There’s a strange mixture of cruelty and sentimentality in her that reminds me of a Flannery O’Connor character untethered from Christianity. She’s attached to her dad and her pony, but not so much to the “instrinsic value” of human life as such. There’s a profound insight here about our Darwinian natures untutored by civilization or about the immaturity of even a precocious girl. That’s not to deny Mattie’s admirable courage, level-headedness, and resolution in the most difficult of conditions, which are even more clear in the book.
The point about trading (even in corpses–which connects this discussion to the one we’ve been having about how to treat the newly dead) is even more profound and points, of course, to a conclusion about what a completely commercial, ruggedly libertarian society would really be like. That’s not to say that Mattie’s two men don’t ascend from commerce to honor to personal love, and we can even stick, to some extent, with Bob’s view that that ascent is a Southern criticism of Northern Lockeanism.
And all of Carl’s observations are about the truth about the state of nature that somehow vindicate both Christianity and Coen-style nihilism. It might even vindicate Southern Stoicism.
Let me add, for the record that reading Carl’s thread brought to my mind immediately Tony Soprano–who brutally murders Ralphie with his bare hands after finding out that Ralphie had the horse he had become attached to killed for the insurance money. I know it’s not the same thing, but…
January 16th, 2011 | 4:53 pm
Well, I do wish my old pal, Mr. Parsons the last conservative in Salem, Oregon would comment simply because he’s read the book. I think I’m getting to the point where I’m going to have to read it myself.
I really enjoyed Dr. Scott’s five points. I have a vision of him in the theatre with pen, pad, and flashlight scribbling furiously!
I don’t subscribe to Dr. Lawler’s opinion of Scott’s no. 5 where he suggests that there’s something of a moral ambivilance in Mattie regard for human life. I think the proper interpretation is that Mattie is expressing a certain moral rectitude circa 1870 where survival and the necessary requirements of ‘justice’ and order trump any fear of Divine retribution for the killing of back shootin’, murderous, low lifes. It’s almost always hard work and a bloody business to establish civilization.
Which is a reply to Scott’s sympathies for the sanctity of the outlaws’ lives as well.
What is fascinating for me is that Dr. Scott presents a refreshing “New England” perspective (commerce) where one is almost anticipating a quote from Emerson. While Peter’s remarks appear to reveal a man who’s inclinations are those of a closet “Southerner!”
A bold statement I know, from a one-eyed, fat man, but one made with the kindest of intentions.
January 16th, 2011 | 7:35 pm
It was Louisiana-bred Mary Nichols, Robert, who taught me about how carefully one ought to watch a movie that merits it.
Mattie undoubtedly is aware of 1870s realities about enforcing and keeping justice, realities which our police still deal with to a lesser extent in our time. But I say she doesn’t know how those realities really play out in the outlaw land she enters into upon crossing that river or what it is really like to experience them. There is a spiritually dangerous hardening of Mattie that occurs as she becomes used to men dying, guns firing, and being in the vicinity of corpses.
That means that even if she HAD to kill Chaney when she does, for reasons of prudent self-defense, the film/book is showing us that this act, and the whole experience leading up to it, is a danger to her soul/character. That, at the very least, is what the snake-pit symbolizes.
But did she have to?
Does the film not show that it was at least possible she didn’t? That she could have held him at gunpoint, awaiting Rooster’s possible return and LaBeauf’s possible recovery?
I’ll return later to discuss the odd place(s) of corpses in this film, thereby uniting our two main Pomocon threads of late, but I’m seriously curious as to what people think about this particular question.
January 16th, 2011 | 9:06 pm
Bob, I was trying to be a bit over-the-top to keep the discussion going. You’re right that I think there’s something true about the South. I can’t wait to think about corpses even more.
January 17th, 2011 | 1:45 am
Very interesting post. I was struck by the commerce aspect of the movie, as well.
But what hit me hardest the next day was the tragedy of the woman that the girl becomes, perhaps because of the reality of the cost of her revenge. Dry. Unsmiling. Without warmth. Totally caught up in her own righteousness (though I did like that she called the aged outlaw Cole Younger who she meets at the Wild West Show, “Dirt.”) These were traits of the girl, but they were mitigated by gentler and “childish” sides to her character, as in the love for her horse and the fond flashback of her dad.
The adventure, which I estimated took about a week, was the only remarkable experience of her life–and it killed the parts of her that could experience joy.
And yet, she is very loyal to Rooster, bringing him home to the family plot. How does that play into your thesis?
January 17th, 2011 | 1:09 pm
Wesley, Rooster becomes her replacement father.
That’s pathetic, as you suggest, if you really think about. I agree with what you say about her joyless life–a life wintry Stoic self-sufficiency.
January 17th, 2011 | 3:58 pm
In response to Mr. Smith:
1. I believe Cole Younger showed respect to Ms. Mattie and Jesse James did not. The insulting comment from Mattie was directed at Mr. James, though I have my doubts that James would treat a young woman ‘in a manner rather rude.’
2. Re: what Ms. Mattie ‘became’, where you see a ” Dry. Unsmiling. Without warmth. Totally caught up in her own righteousness.(girl).”, I see a straight, razor-toed, no non-sense woman who typifies those ladies, particulary Southern ladies, who settled and civilized every frontier this country offered.
3. That this sanguinary event “was the only remarkable experience of her life–and it killed the parts of her that could experience joy,” is a remarkable observation/analysis. At the end of the movie I see a one armed lady who probably spent her life teaching (she may also have married, had ten children, and buried her husband). Her effort to gather up Marshall Cogburn’s remains and see to their placement in her family’s cemetery reflect a symbolic medieval honoring of her champion.
She knew exactly who her pa was and no one could take his place. Rooster facilitated justice and saved her life, for that Mattie loved him. Mattie’s quest is the story of God’s judgment for those who would choose to live the life of a murderer. They may win for a while, but, eventually, they’re going to pay for their foul deeds.
January 18th, 2011 | 1:54 am
Robert, she says she never married.
But I am not as confident as Lawler and Smith in how to interpret what the concluding scene reveals about her character, outside the narration we hear. In maturity, as in youth, Mattie Ross is a “hard one to figure” as Rooster says early on. And she certainly has another kind of true grit to carry herself with dignity as a one-armed old-maid in late 1800s rural America. Although I am with Peter in suspecting that it’s a more stoic than Christian kind of fortitude.
Mattie Ross makes a reference to Ezekiel, she agrees with our funereal threads that embalming and the closure it provides is an overrated scam since the “spirit is departed,” her language partakes of KJV style, but other than that I don’t see her portrayed as noticeably Christian. We don’t see her pray to God, as we do with LaBeauf when he makes his key shot, or “curse” God, as Chaney does at least once, and she’s obviously less religious than her family’s black servant, and it is suggested, than her mother. Nothing in the final scene changes that assessment…we hear the hymn, but we don’t know that it is sounding in Maddie Ross’ spirit. Her closing words are “time seems to get away from us.”
I suspect that her mother is quite Christian, but I do see that the film twice underlines that her father was belonged to a Masonic lodge. Mattie mentions to the funeral director that he will be buried in his “Masons’ cloak” and Mattie is later given his personal possessions, and these include a mason’s pin, a gun, a couple other items…the camera lingers over these and we are told “that’s all he had with him,” perhaps to underline that a Bible is not among them.
January 18th, 2011 | 4:26 am
“she may also have married, had ten children, and buried her husband”
Unless I am mistaken, she did mention something about never marrying in the voice-over at the end of the movie, but I do agree with you that it is a big leap to say that her evident seriousness at the end of the movie means that she couldn’t have had a good life.
“I can’t wait to think about corpses even more”
I know! I think I could talk about what the corpses are doing in this movie all day. But I’ll limit myself for now to one little scene that I found particularly unsettling. When the young criminal asks Cogburn to give him a proper burial so that the wolves won’t get him, Cogburn promises he will and without hesitation breaks that promise. Machiavellian promise breaking never seems very noble or honourable, but when the promise is a dying man’s last wish, this seems to add a special element of disgrace. It is the hardness of the earth that makes giving the dead man the dignity he wished for impractical, and this mere impracticality is all-too-easily decisive for Cogburn.
I do have one other non-corpse-related comment, and that is about the petty viciousness of the villains. Chaney’s crime was from the beginning described as one brought on by vices like drink, gambling and the kind of callous selfishness that makes a man blame others rather than himself for his problems.. The pathetic speech of the condemned man in the beginning of the movie sounds like one we (or perhaps Mattie?) might imagine Chaney giving on his execution-day. When we finally meet Chaney near the end of the movie, I was more inclined to laugh at him or pity him than anything else. The movie also seemed to focus on Cogburn’s drunkenness and general intemperance at least as much as his bloodthirstiness; both seem to make him somewhat like the villains he hunts. I’m not sure what the point of the foregoing observations was, but they did make an impression on me. Perhaps I am more accustomed to stories about nefarious, clever, or implacable villains, even in Coen brothers’ movies. Consider the marshal (!) in “O Brother Where Art Thou”, or that murderous Scandinavian in “Fargo”.
January 18th, 2011 | 1:42 pm
Brendan and Carl, thanks for correcting my erroneous speculation re: Ms. Mattie’s life and I agree with Brendan about the very real possibilities that she had a ‘good’ or happy life. My gross error, had to do, I think, with fading hearing/memory. That’s why I’d really like to have a cd of the movie.
Brendan’s rather insightful differentiation of Rooster’s character and the striking similarities, morally speaking, between Rooster and the (really) bad guys mirrors the existing tension between order and “lustful” disorder, where Rooster’s obvious moral failures starkly contrast the one ordering factor that Rooster swore to uphold; the fact that he was a marshall, an officer of the court.
Because of Mattie, Rooster becomes the Aristotlian “spoudaios”, the man moving from immature to mature where the process comes to denouement when he saves Mattie’s life.
Brendan, I do hope you’ll tell us of the corpses, i do enjoy your analysis.
On the other hand Dr. Scott’s analysis makes me question my original thesis re: Miss Mattie’s ‘Christianity.’ Scott’s introduced an element that I confess to having missed altogether; namely her Pa’s allegiance to the Masons and thus the question of gnosticism. I have to put some thoughts together and report back.
January 19th, 2011 | 2:31 am
Corpse A: Mattie’s father’s, briefly and hazily seen sprawled in the road outside the boarding-house, after Chaney murdered him and fled. This is the first shot of the film, and given the identical motif of hazy lamp-light coming out of a dwelling onto a road at night, it seems book-ended by the last shot of the main “young Mattie” story, where exhausted Rooster, kneeling in the road, looks upon the help his pistol shot has summoned emerging from a frontier dwelling. In the first scene, by contrast, lamp-lit indoors civilization seems indifferent to the corpse lying at its door, just as it is indifferent about the fugitive’s escape. In sum: a presently dishonored corpse, in civilization.
Interlude: the coffin-room. Here Mattie arranges for her father’s corpse (A) to be sent back to her home. She is annoyed that the mortician has embalmed, thus upping the expense, and she refuses his invitation to kiss the corpse (for “closure”). The Masonic cloak is mentioned, and Mattie arranges to sleep there for the night b/c she doesn’t yet have money, but we never see her father’s corpse in these scenes. We don’t see any…well…I think that we do see, in the second coffin-room scene, a stiff hand sticking out from one of the coffins, but we don’t really view the three corpses of the hung criminals that are put there. Poetically, we can say that Mattie has to sleep among the dead. A bit cold that she is willing to do so and that the town of Ft. Smith can’t find anything better for this vulnerable wayfarer.
*******************
Corpse #1: The corpse hanging very high in the tree, left to the birds. “Why did they hang him so high,” asks Mattie. “I do not know,” says Rooster. Do we know? Is there any reason why a man (presumably an outlaw) should be hung so high? The only one I can figure would be to make his body harder to take down, so as to increase the possibility of its undergoing dishonor. We never learn the story behind this. Through Rooster’s giving the corpse to a lone Indian, and he in turn selling it to the bear-man, this corpse literally follows Mattie and Rooster for a time, and its becoming a dismember-able and circulating object of trade is underlined. In sum: a dishonored corpse, in the state of nature, remarkably ABOVE where it ought to be.
Corpse #2: That of the young man Brendan was speaking of, and it is joined by several others after the night gunfight. The dying young man gave information specifically so his corpse would be properly buried, but it isn’t, and the dialogue underlines this fact. We see it along with others “sitting” outside the cabin as Mattie and co. leave. In sum: dishonored corpse(s), in the state of nature, AT GROUND LEVEL.
Corpse #3: That found in the pit, containing snakes. Another anonymous one. One could argue that by this point, Mattie has become used to corpses, and she readily pulls it toward her given the knife on it which might save her. In sum: dishonored corpse, in the state of nature, WAY BELOW GROUND LEVEL.
Mattie cannot get away from corpses, and they are accompanying her downward. Into a pit. Poisoning her.
*******************
Final Scene: We do not see corpses, but we finally see an instance of their being where they are supposed to be–out of sight just below the ground, in a plot with tombstones. These are the only tombstones we see in the film…somewhat odd for a Western. Mattie’s redemption, to the extent it occurs, is caught up in the fact that we thus see her fully carry out the funereal duty of her original Ft. Smith journey, a duty overshadowed then by her quest for justice for the dead. Those 3 oddly-positioned state-of-nature corpses reveal that the whole film is more a quest for BURIAL, connected in some way to a need for redemption, than it is a quest for justice. And in this final scene that quest is realized, outside the state of nature, to be sure, but away from the bustle of town and commerce.
This half-hidden theme of funereal dignity, we might hope, may have wound up speaking to the Coen brothers themselves, who at times have evinced a peculiar interest in the cinematic meat-grinding of human bodies.
January 19th, 2011 | 9:41 am
I was thinking of posting some of Carl’s observations separately under the title CORPSE STUDIES, in line with the famous suggestion by Socrates (in the REPUBLIC’s story about Leontius of Aglaion) that philosophy is somehow about the ability to look at dead bodies without flinching. Mattie surely has that ability, as it barely bothers her to sleep among the stiffs. She’s no Socratic philosopher, but she’s strangely unfemale in her disdain for adornment or masking the truth. If she’s anti-embalming, there’s an instinct in me that wants to go the other way.
January 19th, 2011 | 11:56 pm
Carl Eric Scott: That’s brilliant.
Back to my comment about the tragedy of what Mattie became. She doesn’t just say she never married, she says in a very tight way that she never had time for such nonsense. (That isn’t a quote, but it is the gist.) That sat me up in my chair. She seemed quite Scrooge like, all law and no equity, if you will.
Her quest to see Rooster, who she doesn’t know has died, is presented (I thought) as a major departure from what she would normally do in life. I think she says she didn’t usually travel. It is a life seemingly without joy or “frivolity.”
Peter: I am not sure he became a father figure since she apparently had a good relationship with her real father based on the flashback. She never saw Rooster other than during that one week, albeit an earth shattering week, and this is 25 years later. They also apparently didn’t correspond. He never wrote back to accept or reject her offer of the second $50 she owed him. He then wrote her out of the blue saying he would be nearby with the Wild West Show. (An old marshal appearing with two notorious non fictional outlaws, Frank James and Cole Younger–who actually did do that–reinforces the theme that the good guys and bad guys were not altogether different.)
Perhaps, she saw moving his body to her home plot as payment of a duly owed debt. That would be in character, or perhaps–and this appeals to me– that would be her rationalization to herself allowing her to do something purely out of emotion and love.
January 20th, 2011 | 2:29 am
Not just without flinching mind you, but even taking an unwholesome delight in looking at them!
I wonder about the meaning of the state of nature for the 3 corpses, particularly the first. It would seem that this corpse was particularly and deliberately dishonoured by the people who put it there. Certainly this is not an appropriate, customary, humane or civilized condition for a corpse, but it does not seem exactly natural in the way that the other two are.
Particularly the second corpse; the young man was concerned precisely with the prospect of his corpse being left in a state of nature (the wolves). It is nature that ostensibly gets in the way of Cogburn burying him, (the earth is hard in the winter) and he is even removed from the cabin and set outside on the ground in nature.
I was thinking about the significance of the corpses of the three criminals, and it occurred to me that we never really see Chaney’s corpse at all, if I am not mistaken. He is shot, and he falls off the cliff, but for all we know he may have died on the way down. Given how many other corpses Mattie sees in the movie, it seems significant that she never really does get to see the one corpse she was looking for the entire time, so to speak.
I really like Carl’s observation that the movie is about redemption through burial rather than justice. If justice was really the main theme, the final scene would be even stranger; ending a movie decades after the resolution of the conflict not for a reunion of the main characters, but for the burial of one by the other.
Has anyone said anything about the loss of Mattie’s arm? I am not sure what it might mean, but it is certainly striking seeing the one-armed older Mattie in the final scenes.
January 20th, 2011 | 10:17 am
So, Brendan, it’s true that in Socrates’ story desire finally whips spiritedness. But that’s not obviously Mattie or the Coens: They really are about the unflinching acceptance: Mattie never loses his head and never stops trying to figure stuff out for herself (read the book on her quick calculations about the snakes with her in the pit etc.–no praying or despair going on there)–at least as when she’s not half-dead on the way to the doctor. Is Mattie’s life joyless? Or is their joy in the mature Mattie’s serenity about time etc.; she does say was too busy for marriage etc. ? Is their joy in the Coens’ figuring out and commnicating to us something about nature and perhaps the futility of human longings (or perhaps not)–we haven’t really figured all this out yet? On reunion through burial (which is creepy and cool), see the last chapter on “Home” in the American Stoic William Alexander Percy’s LANTERNS ON THE LEVE. Wesley, I agree (on Mattie’s absent arm etc.), that we need to move beyond CORPSE STUDIES to MUTILATION STUDIES (and n all this I’m fading as an expert, I saw the movie only once and about a month ago)
February 1st, 2011 | 7:32 pm
Fascinating discussions. Has any of you guys read the book? In the book, Rooster does honor the young man’s (his name is Moon) wish to be buried properly; and Mattie does pray before she goes to bed; the hanging man on the tree and the bear-man are not in the book; Mattie makes comments about Judge Parker’s deathbed conversion to his wife’s religion: Catholicism… That’s just some small discrepancies. One does wonder about the Coens intentions making these departures. Highly recommend the book. On a whole, it’s funnier than the movie and a real pleasure to read.
By the way, just an aside, we live in Fort Smith, Arkansas. If you guys ever find yourselves in our region, get in touch. We’ll give you a tour of Judge Parker’s old court house, and the gallows.
February 2nd, 2011 | 2:47 pm
If we come out to Fort Smith, will you take us out to the ‘nations?’
February 26th, 2011 | 11:25 pm
Interesting comments. A couple of thoughts:
1. It would take a brave man to marry Mattie. And she wouldn’t seize and marry a weakling just to dominate him— she wouldn’t feel the need. Thus she became an old maid.
2. It’s easy to see why only the horse’s death bothers Mattie: only the horse is innocent. Only modern sissies are bothered by bad guys getting killed. To be sure, she perhaps doesn’t show Christian restraint in her desire for vengeance on her father’s killer, but that’s a tough temptation, especially for someone who like her would have a strong belief for justice in general. And what should the Christian attitude be, actually? Should a good Christian allow his father’s killer to go unpunished?
August 18th, 2011 | 1:41 pm
[...] adding so much also. It’s the essay our Robert Cheeks wanted to read back in January, when we pomocons went nuts over the film in several threads, and it brings out the Southern and Democratic Party sympathies of the book very [...]
October 3rd, 2012 | 10:34 am
[...] time. And I now discern Peter’s master plan: by inviting me to write a paper on TRUE GRIT and corpses, he knew he’d be giving my academic CV a decisive edge! A way to dress up my penchant for [...]
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